If you need for a view (and all its subviews) not to be focusable by assistive tech like VoiceOver, you can set its accessibilityElementsHidden property to true. This isn't needed very often, but it can be useful for certain custom experiences.

Twitter app in the Notifications section. There are two tabs. One for All, and one for Mentions. The content comes after the tabs in a horizontally scrollable paged view. When the Mentions tab is selected, and the focus is on the Mentions tab, if the user swipes to the right, VoiceOver will look for the next element from top-left to bottom-right. So it may try to focus the first element in the scroll view, which would be the first tweet from the

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What is the difference between isAccessibilityElement and accessibilityElementsHidden? The first one makes the view not accessible, but its subviews can still be accessible. The second one hides the view and all its subviews from assistive tech.

Sometimes you can create your own accessibility elements from scratch to group elements too. Perhaps because they're not contained in the same superview. You can combine these elements' frames and provide a suitable accessibility label.

You can create your own accessibility elements from scratch. One use-case for doing that is when you do some custom drawing instead of building your UI using or relying on UIKit components. A circular progress bar, could be an example.


Content © Daniel Devesa Derksen-Staats on Accessibility up to 11! is licensed under CC BY 4.0. License details